Critical Problems Of Language, Knowledge, And Culture

By Author: Shirley Green
Total Articles: 129
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One possible direction for such considerations to take is to foreground the "intellectual" and "theoretical" work that rhetoricians and compositionists produce in the process of teaching first-year courses. For example, Bartholomae has explained that he regularly teaches first-year composition because he sees it as a place where one can "think out critical problems of language, knowledge, and culture through the work of 'ordinary' or 'novice' or student writers, a way of working on the 'popular' in relation to academic or high culture." It is, as he puts it, an "intellectual project". We see a similar move in James Slevin's identification of the teaching of first-year composition as an activity of "interpretive pedagogy" in which teachers work "collaboratively with students and colleagues to interpret educational practices and Thomas Sabo Jewellery to work for educational reform" (Introducing 2). This pedagogy, Slevin asserts, is "made possible, within schooling, only when and because students participate fully in the work of composition". In such arguments, key terms in the discourse ...
... about the day-to-day work of rhetoric and composition students, teaching, difference, intellectual projects are given inflections alternative to dominant institutional designations of the space of the first-year composition course as a site only for the application of the fruits of intellectual projects conducted elsewhere; of the teaching of first-year composition as appropriate only for non-tenure-line instructors providing the service of "delivery" of these fruits; and of students as (at best) the depositories for such deliveries. Instead, students are seen as participating with teachers in the project of "thinking out critical problems of language, knowledge, and culture."

But to be more useful, such alternative accounts of our work would need to be contextualized in terms of the specific material conditions obtaining, and shaping, these efforts. The ways teachers make the teaching of first-year composition an "intellectual project" in which students collaborate are Thomas Sabo Bracelets likely to differ radically as these efforts engage with the specific program and institution in which that teaching is housed, the instructor's professional status, physical plant conditions, and the number and material situations of the students. And these accounts should also include discussions of ways to improve the conditions of teaching that would further such work. Likewise, accounts of research can be contextualized in terms of perceived exigencies on the ground, rather than by pursuing the traditional academic exchange value of being recognized as "purely academic" in their motivation, production, and consequences.

Such efforts at redefining the work of rhetoric and composition are in keeping with Andrea Lunsford's observation that even the conflicts animating the field are prompted because of commitments "to link the scholarly and the pedagogical and the practical at every turn; and to make students and learning the heart of our endeavors". Of course, it is possible to understand this linking in ways that reinforce the binaries of rhetoric/composition, theory/practice, scholarship/teaching, and so on. But it is also possible to pursue ways that counter these. For example, the ways in which rhetorical theory, rather than taking us away from teaching, emerges out of teaching can help to counter the theory/practice, research/teaching chain of binaries structuring the standard paradigms for rhetoric and composition. Further, seeing both "teaching" and "theorizing" as acts of composing rhetoric's would call for evaluation of our theories as well as our practices in terms of social material exigencies and actions. This would require that we contextualize our theories and practices in terms of local, disciplinary, institutional, and global histories, interests, concerns, and goals.